Complete Works of Emile Zola (322 page)

There was a short silence, after which came a sound of paper being roughly crumpled, and the Abbé said, with evident displeasure:

‘It’s always the same old story. She wants to come to us and bring her husband with her, so that we may get him a situation somewhere. She seems to think that we are wallowing in gold. I’m afraid they will be doing something rash — perhaps taking us by surprise some fine morning.’

‘No, no! we can’t do with them here, Ovide!’ his mother replied. ‘They have never liked you; they have always been jealous of you. Trouche is a scamp and Olympe is quite heartless. They would want everything for them­selves, and they would compromise you and interfere with your work.’

Mouret was too much excited by the meanness of the act he was committing to be able to hear well, and, besides, he thought that one of them was coming to the door, so he hurried away. He took care not to mention what he had done. A few days later Abbé Faujas, in his presence, while they were all out on the terrace, gave Marthe a definite reply respecting the Secretaryship at the Home.

‘I think I can recommend you a suitable person,’ he said, in his calm way. ‘It is a connection of my own, my brother-in-law, who is coming here from Besançon in a few days.’

Mouret became very attentive, while Marthe appeared delighted.

‘Oh, that is excellent!’ she exclaimed. ‘I was feeling very much bothered about finding a suitable person. You see, with all those young girls, we must have a person of un­exceptionable morality, but of course a connection of yours — ‘

‘Yes, yes,’ interrupted the priest; ‘my sister had a little hosiery business at Besançon, which she has been obliged to give up on account of her health; and now she is anxious to join us again, as the doctors have ordered her to live in the south. My mother is very much pleased.’

‘I’m sure she must be,’ said Marthe. ‘I dare say it grieved you very much to have to separate, and you will be very glad to be together again. I’ll tell you what you must do. There are a couple of rooms upstairs that you don’t use; why shouldn’t your sister and her husband have them? They have no children, have they?’

‘No, there are only their two selves. I had, indeed, thought for a moment of giving them those two rooms; but I was afraid of displeasing you by bringing other people into your house.’

‘Not at all, I assure you. You are very quiet people.’

She checked herself suddenly, for her husband was tugging at her dress. He did not want to have the Abbé’s relations in the house, for he remembered in what terms Madame Faujas had spoken of her daughter and son-in-law.

‘The rooms are very small,’ he began; ‘and Monsieur l’Abbé would be inconvenienced. It would be better for all parties that his sister should take lodgings somewhere else; there happen to be some rooms vacant just now at the Paloques’ house, over the way.’

There was a dead pause in the conversation. The priest said nothing, but gazed up into the sky. Marthe thought he was offended, and she felt much distressed at her husband’s bluntness. After a moment she could no longer endure the embarrassing silence. ‘Well, it’s settled then,’ she said, without any attempt at skill in knitting the broken threads of the conversation together again, ‘Rose shall help your mother to clean the rooms. My husband was only thinking about your own personal convenience; but, of course, if you wish it, it is not for us to prevent you from disposing of the rooms in any way you like.’

Mouret was quite angry when he again found himself alone with his wife.

‘I can’t understand you at all!’ he cried. ‘When first I let the rooms to the Abbé, you were quite displeased, and seemed to hate the thought of having even so much as a cat brought into the house; and now I believe you would be perfectly willing for the Abbé to bring the whole of his relations, down to his third and fourth cousins. Didn’t you feel me tugging at your dress? You might have known that I didn’t want those people. They are not very respectable folks.’

‘How do you know that?’ cried Marthe, annoyed by this accusation. ‘Who told you so?’

‘Who, indeed? It was Abbé Faujas himself. I overheard him one day while he was talking to his mother.’

She looked at him keenly; and he blushed slightly beneath her gaze as he stammered:

‘Well, it is sufficient that I do know. The sister is a heartless creature and her husband is a scamp. It’s of no use your putting on that air of insulted majesty; those were their own words, and I’m inventing nothing. I don’t want to have those people here, do you understand? The old lady herself was the first to object to her daughter coming here. The Abbé now seems to have changed his mind. I don’t know what has led him to alter his opinion. It’s some fresh mystery of his. He’s going to make use of them somehow.’ Marthe shrugged her shoulders and allowed her husband to rail on. He told Rose not to clean the rooms, but Rose now only obeyed her mistress’s orders. For five days his anger vented itself in bitter words and furious recriminations. In Abbé Faujas’s presence he confined himself to sulking, for he did not dare to attack the priest openly. Then, as usual, he ended by submitting, and ceased to rail at the people who were coming. But he drew his purse-strings still tighter, isolated himself, shut himself up more and more in his own selfish existence. When the Trouches arrived one October evening, he merely exclaimed:

‘The deuce! they don’t look a nice couple. What faces they have!’

Abbé Faujas did not appear very desirous that his sister and brother-in-law should be seen on that occasion. His mother took up a position by the street-door, and as soon as she caught sight of them turning out of the Place of the Sub-Prefecture, she glanced uneasily behind her into the hall and the kitchen. Luck was, however, against her, for just as the Trouches arrived, Marthe, who was going out, came up from the garden, followed by her children.

‘Ah! there you all are!’ she said, with a pleasant smile.

Madame Faujas, who was generally so completely mistress of herself, could not suppress a slight show of confusion as she stammered a word or two of reply. For some moments they stood confronting and scrutinising each other in the hall. Mouret had hurriedly mounted the steps and Rose had taken up her position at the kitchen door.

‘You must be very glad to be together again,’ said Marthe, addressing Madame Faujas.

Then, noticing the feeling of embarrassment which was keeping them all silent, she turned towards Trouche and added:

‘You arrived by the five o’clock train, I suppose? How long were you in getting here from Besançon?’

‘Seventeen hours in the train,’ Trouche replied, opening a toothless mouth. ‘It is no joke that, in a third-class carriage, I can tell you. One gets pretty well shaken up inside.’

Then he laughed with a peculiar clattering of his jaws. Madame Faujas cast a very angry glance at him, and he began to fumble mechanically at his greasy overcoat, trying to fasten a button that was no longer there, and pressing to his thighs (doubtless in order to hide some stains) a couple of cardboard bonnet-boxes which he was carrying, one green and the other yellow. His red throat was perpetually gurgling beneath a twisted, ragged black neckcloth, over which appeared the edge of a dirty shirt. In his wrinkled face, which seemed to reek with vice, there glistened two little black eyes that rolled about incessantly, examining everybody and everything with an expression of astonishment and covetousness. They looked like the eyes of a thief studying a house to which he means to return in order to plunder it some night.

Mouret fancied that Trouche was examining the fastenings.

‘That fellow,’ he thought to himself, ‘looks as though he were getting the patterns of the locks into his head!’

Olympe was conscious that her husband had made a vulgar remark. She was a tall, slight woman, fair and faded, with a flat plain face. She carried a little deal box and a big bundle tied up in a tablecloth.

‘We have brought some pillows with us,
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she said, glancing at the bundle. ‘Pillows come in very usefully in a third-class carriage; they make one quite as comfortable as if one were travelling first-class. It is a great saving, going third, and it is of no use throwing money away, is it?’

‘Certainly not,’ Marthe replied, somewhat surprised by the appearance and language of the new-comers.

Olympe now came forward and went on talking in an ingratiating way.

‘It’s the same thing with clothes,’ said she; ‘when I set off on a journey I put on my shabbiest things. I told Honoré that his old overcoat was quite good enough. And he has got his old work-day trousers on too, trousers that he’s quite tired of wearing. You see I selected my worse dress; it is actually in holes, I believe. This shawl was mother’s; I used to iron on it at home; and this bonnet I’m wearing is an old one that I only put on when I go to the wash-house; but it’s quite good enough to get spoilt with the dust, isn’t it, madame?’

‘Certainly, certainly,’ replied Marthe, trying to force a smile.

Just at this moment a stern voice was heard from the top of the stairs, calling sharply: ‘Well! now, mother!’

Mouret raised his head and saw Abbé Faujas leaning against the second-floor banisters, looking very angry, and bending over, at the risk of falling, to get a better view of what was going on in the passage. He had heard a sound of talking and had been waiting there for a moment or two in great impatience.

‘Come, mother, come!’ he cried again.

‘Yes, yes, we are coming up,’ answered Madame Faujas, trembling at the sound of her son’s angry voice.

Then turning to the Trouches, she said:

‘Come along, my children, we must go upstairs. Let us leave madame to attend to her business.’

But the Trouches did not seem to hear; they appeared quite satisfied to remain in the passage, and they looked about them with a well-pleased air, as though the house, had just been presented to them.

‘It is very nice, very nice indeed, isn’t it, Honoré?’ Olympe said. ‘After what Ovide wrote in his letters we scarcely expected to find it so nice as this, did we? But I told you that we ought to come here, and that we should do better here, and I am right, you see.’

‘Yes, yes, we ought to be very comfortable here,’ Trouche murmured. ‘The garden, too, seems a pretty big one.’

Then addressing Mouret, he inquired:

‘Do you allow your lodgers to walk in the garden, sir?’

Before Mouret had time to reply, Abbé Faujas, who had come downstairs, cried out in thundering tones:

‘Come, Trouche! Come, Olympe!’

They turned round; and when they saw him standing on the steps looking terribly angry, they fairly quailed and meekly followed him. The Abbé went up the stairs in front of them without saying another word, without even seeming to observe the presence of Mouret, who stood gazing after the singular procession. Madame Faujas smiled at Marthe to take away the awkwardness of the situation as she brought up the rear.

Marthe then went out, and Mouret, left to himself, lingered a moment or two in the passage. Upstairs, on the second floor, doors were being noisily banged. Then loud voices were heard, and presently there came dead silence.

‘Has he locked them up separately, I wonder?’ said Mouret to himself, with a laugh. ‘Well, anyhow, they are not a nice family.’

On the very next day, Trouche, respectably dressed, entirely in black, shaven, and with his scanty hair carefully brushed over his temples, was presented by Abbé Faujas to Marthe and the lady patronesses. He was forty-five years of age, wrote a first-rate hand, and was said to have kept the books of a mercantile house for a long time. The ladies at once installed him as secretary. His duties were to represent the committee, and employ himself in certain routine work from ten till four in an office on the first floor of the Home. His salary was to be fifteen hundred francs.

‘Those good people are very quiet, you see,’ Marthe remarked to her husband a few days afterwards.

Indeed the Trouches made no more noise than the Faujases. Two or three times Rose asserted that she had heard quarrels between the mother and daughter, but the Abbé’s grave voice had immediately restored peace. Trouche went out every morning punctually at a quarter to ten, and came back again at a quarter past four. He never went out in the evening. Olympe occasionally went shopping with Madame Faujas, but she was never seen to come down the stairs by herself.

The window of the room in which the Trouches slept overlooked the garden. It was the last one on the right, in front of the trees of the Sub-Prefecture. Big curtains of red calico, with a yellow border, hung behind the glass panes, making a strong contrast, when seen from outside, with the priest’s white ones. The window was invariably kept closed. One evening when Abbé Faujas and his mother were out on the terrace with the Mourets, a slight involuntary cough was heard, and as the priest raised his head with an expression of annoyance, he caught sight of Olympe and her husband leaning out of the window. For a moment or two he kept his eyes turned upwards, thus interrupting his conversation with Marthe. At this the Trouches disappeared; and those below heard the window-catch being fastened.

‘You had better go upstairs, I think, mother,’ said the priest. ‘I am afraid you may be catching cold out here.’

Madame Faujas wished them all good-night; and, when she had retired, Marthe resumed the conversation by asking in her kindly way:

‘Is your sister worse? I have not seen her for a week.’

‘She has great need of rest,’ the priest curtly answered. However, Marthe’s sympathetic interest made her continue the subject.

‘She shuts herself up too much,’ said she; ‘the fresh air would do her good. These October evenings are still quite warm. Why doesn’t she ever come out into the garden? She has never set foot in it. You know that it is entirely at your disposal.’

The priest muttered a few vague words of excuse, and then Mou­ret, to increase his embarrassment, manifested still greater amiability than his wife’s.

‘That’s just what I was saying this morning,’ he began.

‘Monsieur l’Abbé’s sister might very well bring her sewing out here in the sun in the afternoons, instead of keeping herself shut in upstairs. Anyone would think that she daren’t even show herself at the window. She isn’t frightened of us, I hope! We are not such terrible people as all that! And Monsieur Trouche, too, he hurries up the stairs, four steps at a time. Tell them to come and spend an evening with us now and then. They must be frightfully dull up in that room of theirs, all alone.
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